Rebuttal to switched.com’s reasons to not buy the iPhone.
Jun 28th, 2007 by dmess0r
Over on the site switched.com, they wrote an article back on the 25th of this month with several reasons to not buy the iPhone. Personally I believe those reasons are mostly bunk. Here is the text from an email response I gave to a relative of mine.
Read this article first:
http://www.switched.com/2007/06/25/five-more-reasons-not-to-buy-the-iphone/
Enjoy.
Interestingly enough. each of these excuses are pretty lame. This phone is what I would call a 3nd generation smartphone. Although the first revision of this phone of course won’t be the end all be all utility, it has to arrive to the mainstream, and people should buy it to expose bugs and have apple fold the solutions to those bugs into the next revision.
Rebuttal to the first argument is simple for me. If you’re buying the iPhone, you clearly are interested in apple products and want a phone as well as an iPod. It only makes sense that you *should* have an iTunes account even if you don’t use it to buy anything. Simply having the iTunes account costs nothing, and gives you access to music information that you obviously care about. For me, this point is moot.
The next bit about no direct-to-phone downloads is petty; the mainstream doesn’t have the phone in their hands yet, so this is pure speculation. Apple will respond to this one with verve shortly.
The no built-in-gps is a reasonable argument, but quite honestly this is an edge case. I have had my Treo and several other phones for quite some time now, and as a tech-savvy person, I still to this day have had limited need for GPS in my phone.
The next bit about 8gb of memory not being enough is valid, however, as far as I understand the iPhone uses solid-state memory. Adding more than 8gb of solid state will drive up the cost tremendously. If they decided to use a hard drive based system like some iPods, they could increase the storage at the expense of moving parts, weight and increased size. So my answer to this is, “8gb is the most cost effective solution given the economics to ergonomics.” You want more memory? Give it time and the solid state memory market will slowly come down. There is no simple answer to this one.
The last bit about it not playing well with Exchange is also mostly speculation at this time. Apple has not revealed enough technical detail on the methods used for synchronization outside of .Mac and POP/IMAP. There may indeed be methods in the works to provide this functionality that we’re simply not aware of at this time.
Many people forget that the iPhone has updateable firmware which is easily accessible from the iTunes interface, and apple will be aggressively patching and correcting bugs as time goes on. Issues surrounding synchronization should not be a factor that stops you from buying the phone.
Go apple, and more power to you. I hope a devkit comes out eventually. I really would like to start making my own widgets.